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Planting ideas
The Ada Hayden Herbarium is celebrating 130 years of existence this
year
Both Lynn Clark and Deb Lewis are quick to point out that the Ada Hayden
Herbarium may be 130 years old this year, but it's far from being old.
"The herbarium is not a 130-year-old dusty museum," said Lewis,
the herbarium's curator. "Instead it's an active facility whose primary
use is for research. It serves as a permanent record that this particular
plant grew on this site on this date."
And it's a museum that is continually growing from humble beginnings in
1871 soon after Charles Bessey arrived at Iowa State Agricultural College
and began collecting plant specimens for the herbarium. Then the plant library
had representatives of only 2,500 species.
Today the Hayden Herbarium contains over 430,000 dried and pressed plant
and fungus specimens. Functioning primarily as a research facility important
for taxonomic studies, it is also used for identifying unknown plants.
Specimens are loaned to specialists at other institutions around the world
to support research. Loans from other institutions allow Iowa State researchers
access to other collections, which have recently become a source of materials
to use in molecular studies and to support basic research on diversity.
"A herbarium is very fundamental to aspects of the life sciences,"
said Clark, professor and interim chair of the Department of Botany. Clark
has also served as the director of the Hayden Herbarium since 1989.
"A herbarium is a large mine of data," she continued. "It
contains such information as when and where a plant was collected."
The Hayden Herbarium is a large mine of data. It currently ranks 18th in
size of the collection among university herbaria in the nation. It is also
within the top 30 overall in size of more than 600 United States herbaria,
including those at botanical gardens and museums.
The general collection includes flowering plants (angiosperms), conifers
(gymnosperms), ferns (pteridophytes), mosses and liverworts (bryophytes),
algae and lichens, Iowa's vascular plants, grasses from throughout the Western
Hemisphere, and legumes from North America.
"Some of the collections are very important," said Clark. "We
have the biggest collection of Iowa plants and fungi in the world."
Clark estimates that nearly all of Iowa's estimated 2,000 species of ferns,
conifers and flower plants are included in the herbarium. And the facility's
collection of tropical American grasses is among the largest in the nation.
"I would say that only the Field Museum in Chicago, the Smithsonian
Museum of Natural History and the Missouri Botanical Gardens would have
collections of tropical American grasses that are larger or more diverse
than ours is," she said.
There are also three other collections in the Hayden Herbarium of international
importance.
C.C. Parry Historical Collection - Parry, a resident of
Davenport, collected thousands of plant specimens throughout the midwestern,
western, and southwestern U.S., and northern Mexico. He also actively exchanged
specimens with other preeminent botanists of the period. The holdings in
this collection were all obtained between 1848-95 and were often the earliest
known collection from an area.
J.P. Anderson Alaskan Collection - One of the world’'s
largest collections of Alaskan plants is included in the Hayden Herbarium.
Anderson personally collected 11,000 specimens and accumulated thousands
of others through gift and exchange.
"I would say that this is the most historically important collection
of Alaska flora," Clark said.
Mycological (Fungus) Collection - Containing an estimated
33,000 packeted and boxed specimens, the collection was started by Bessey
and continued by Louis H. Pammel, George Washington Carver and currently
by Lois Tiffany, Distinguished Professor of botany.
And while Clark and Lewis are continually looking to the herbarium's future
- they are in the process of creating a database for the 430,000 specimens
- the Hayden Herbarium's past is also important.
Those individuals involved with the herbarium over the years reads like
a "who's who" of Iowa State. Bessey, Carver and Pammel were pioneers
in their field. J.C. Arthur, a botany student, was in the first class to
receive bachelor's degrees at Iowa State, and later became the first to
receive a graduate degree here, as well.
Ada Hayden is the first woman to receive a Ph.D. at Iowa State in 1918 and
two years later was appointed assistant professor of botany. She became
the curator of the herbarium in 1934 and continued in that role until her
death in 1950. The facility was named in her honor in 1988.
"To me the herbarium goes well beyond plants," Lewis said. "It's
a link to people both past and present. I honestly think that the history
of the herbarium and botany at Iowa State is important. These people were
good botanists who had a lot to tell us about plant life.
"The herbarium is history brought to life from those dried, flatten
plants," she continued. "It represents the dynamic nature of the
whole world of plants."
Around LAS
November 5-11
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